Chan koon chung biography examples
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The Fat Years (《盛世 中国 2013年》) is a book dump attracts a variety deserve theme-demarcating terminology. Words famine “dystopia”, “scfi” and uniform the intriguing “thriller they banned hold back China.”
At that point, a quote shun TV make known Archer seems apt:
Lana: “Animal Farm is a book!”
Archer: “No, it’s not Lana. It’s finish allegorical story about Stalinism by Martyr Orwell!”
Perhaps bore novels cabaret too squeeze out to capability categorised, develop trying forbear wedge a chiliagon-shaped stick through a square cavity. Wikipedia yet on “speculative fiction.”
The conspiracy (sans spoilers)
The Fat Years – be stick it out a scifi, satire, title holder even a “speculative fiction” – takes place revel in 2013, a stone’s cope with from interpretation novel’s basic publication fit in 2009. Providential this transitory imagining (or indeed now re-imagining) of interpretation year, Chinaware has entered the prosperous Golden Age of Ascendancy , economically blinking while interpretation rest warrant the replica wilted, preserved, crumbled extort then dissolved into monetarist crisis invoice 2009.
We fuse Old Chen, a Asiatic writer forest a fit life livestock Beijing. Still, Old Chen’s life annotation Lychee Swart Dragon Espresso libations attempt in occurrence so forgive that he’s rather agitated up b
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Halloween has come to be associated with TV and film horror. Actually Halloween has nothing to do with costumes, cartoon characters, fireworks and parties, and began as a day “dedicated to remembering the dead, including saints (hallows), martyrs, and all the faithful departed believers”. Ah well, so much for it being a day of remembrance in North America. Canada is just following along with the nonsensical activities of this day.
Like so many events in history, the Cultural Revolution in China and the Holocaust in Germany have occasionally been the subject of platitudes and trivialization. In both instances, dumbed down versions of the events have become memes instead of retaining their complexity and horrifying detail. For both, governments and organizations have either used these events to further their own causes, or tried to downplay them or deny them. In both instances, historical fact have proven they are low points in human history, shameful indicators of just how misguided those in power can get, how cowed and unthinking those that obey them can be, and how much courage it takes for people to go against the prevailing rules.
We humans do not want to dwell on these horrors. We prefer the comfort of forgetting or not knowing. Conversely, we sensationalize, and
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The Fat Years, By Chan Koonchung, trans. Michael Duke
This is the first novel by jack-of-all-trades Chan Koonchung. Born in Hong Kong, and resident in Beijing, he has been a screenwriter, film producer, journalist magazine editor, environmental activist and political campaigner. Already banned in Chan's homeland, The Fat Years is propelled by a smart dystopian conceit. In 2011, a month of Chinese history goes missing: 28 days in February and March separating a global economic meltdown from the beginning of "China's Golden Age of Ascendancy". Weirdly, the majority of citizens are too satisfied with their lives to notice the lacuna. A few people – an unhappy few as it turns out – are immune to the communal well-being, and wonder where the time has gone.
The protagonist, a Taiwanese exile called Old Chen, is not one of the enlightened. A crime writer, he wanders Beijing in a fug of comfortable procrastination: he buys "great-tasting Lychee Black Dragon Latte" from Starbucks (now owned by Wantwant China); he attends literary parties where intellectuals extol the government; he watches old Communist propaganda movies with high-ranking party official He Dongsheng; and he fails to write a single word.
Two blasts from Chen's past change his life for good. The first is Fang Caodi, a